


Fire Heart

by icewhisper



Series: Leonard Snart Shorts [8]
Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Dragon AU, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 15:10:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11969973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icewhisper/pseuds/icewhisper
Summary: “That’s a…” The boy trailed off and Leonard opened his mouth to finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. The worddragongot swallowed by the boy’s startled laugh. “The giant toads talk?!”(Wherein Leonard and Lisa were raised by dragons and Mick is a horrible dragon hunter.)





	Fire Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Written as part of my writing blog, [leonardsnartwrites](https://leonardsnartwrites.tumblr.com/). Normally, it would have been posted under the collections fic, [Leonard Snart Shorts](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10837056), but ended up taking a life of its own.
> 
> Robininthelabyrinth prompt: Mick's fear of giant toads is due to having to hunt them as pests as a kid. Except the "giant toads" his mom would send him after were actually dragons and Mick is, unbeknownst to himself, one of the foremost ex dragon hunters in his area. Coldwave.

His teachers had always said he was too smart for his own good. In any other situation, they would have praised him, called him gifted, and boasted about him to other teachers. They never did that with Leo, Leo who was smart in ways teachers didn’t approve of. He found the answers to tests and they suspected—but never determined—that he was selling answers to other kids. He was smart enough to slip past the teachers and off school grounds. He was quick enough to twist a situation into something that helped him come out ahead.

They didn’t talk about the bruises that littered pale skin or when he wore the same clothes three days in a row.

They didn’t talk about the dead mother or the drunk father or the too-young step mother with her rounded belly.

They didn’t talk about it, but no one was surprised when the baby was born and that new wife left them all behind. _She saved herself_ , they’d say with looks, but never thought about the children she’d damned when she left them in her rearview.

No one was surprised when Leonard and little Lisa disappeared two months later. Lewis Snart raged, calling on whatever old friends he still had from the police force, but it turned on his head. Suspicious eyes turned towards the dirty cop turned drunk and thoughts of runaways turned into accusations of murder.

They found Lewis guilty of murder without either body ever being found.

No one cried when he died in prison a year later, but it would be over a decade before Leonard found out his father had died with a shiv buried in his chest.

Lisa looked up at him when Agni told them in his low, gravelly voice. Her eyebrows dipped downwards, confused, because Len had told her the stories of why he stole her away from their father, but she had no memories of him. All she’d ever known were the scars on her brother’s body and the way he sometimes couldn’t stand to be touched. “Lenny?”

He dropped a hand onto her shoulder and squeezed. “It’s okay,” he told her and turned blue eyes to the golden, reptilian ones of the dragon bent in front of them. “We’re safe.”

Lewis Snart hadn’t been their father in years.

They were dragon-kind now.

 

 

When he left the house, it was with Lisa—tiny, baby Lisa that couldn’t grow up to know the fear their father instilled—strapped to his chest. His school bag was heavy on his back, books left behind in a desk he’d never go back to and filled to the brim with as many supplies as he could fit. He took the diapers and the formula and everything he thought she might need, but packed nothing for himself. No clothes. No food.

He kissed her head as they hid in the back of a bus he’d snuck them onto and promised they’d be okay. Him, barely thirteen. Her, barely old enough to hold her own head up. She was his more than she’d ever been Lewis’.

People barely looked at them as he weaved through the crowds until city gave way to town and, then, to isolation.

“I don’t know where we’re going,” he admitted to her one night after they’d managed to get through the cluster of businesses Keystone called a town. He’d hoped for something better, a motel or a car he could slip into for the night, but they’d ventured too far from civilization by the time he realized his legs couldn’t carry them any further.

He held her tight against him and wrapped her in the warm jacket instead of himself. Too cold for a baby. She needed it more than he did, but his teeth still chattered as he tried to sleep. Half-frozen bark cut through the thin shirt, stabbing into his back, and he shifted again.

Whispered an old song his mom used to sing to him. It wasn’t Hebrew and it wasn’t Amharic, but it sparked a warmth in his chest. Happy memories calmed him as the song kept Lisa safely asleep and he pretended it would be enough to keep them both from freezing to death.

He drifted off, wondering all the while if it would be the last time he did, and woke up to warmth and scales.

His brain, usually so sharp, was sluggish as he realized he was staring at a dragon. His mother’s old stories came to mind, fairy tales turned real, and he thought he might still be dreaming.

“Who taught you that song, child?” came the voice, though the dragon’s mouth barely moved. He felt it vibrate through his chest as much as it sounded in his head, startling and melodic at the same time. It made Lisa stir in his arms, fussing until she calmed again.

“My mother,” he told the dragon and pretended his voice didn’t shake. “Hanna Hashim.” Not Snart, but her maiden name, the one she used to say she’d wanted him to have.

“Where is she?”

“She died,” he whispered as his eyes dropped away from golden ones to look at Lisa instead. “Cancer.”

A deep rumble came that sounded like the dragon was mourning. A snout touched his shoulder. “She was dragon-kind.”

In a way, Leonard had known that. His mother’s stories had been shaped around dragons their family had served for centuries, spoke of her heartbreak when she left it all behind, but she’d thought she’d found love with Lewis.

“The dragons hadn’t trusted him,” she admitted once and sounded like she was angry with herself for not listening to them. “Always trust the judgement of dragons, _ye’inē t’afach’i_. They can see into your soul.”

He trusted them. He put his trust into beings that shouldn’t have existed, simply because he still trusted his mother. Stories came, memories shared through familial bonds the dragons had formed with his mother’s bloodline centuries ago. He saw her smile and heard the laugh whose memory had been lost to time.

He stayed.

They stayed.

The dragons took them in, small as the clan was and damaged as Leonard was, and gave them a home in the deepest part of the Keystone woods. Trees gave way to magic and pocket dimensions with their open fields and winding rivers.

Leonard grew, slipping between trees like a snake.

Lisa grew, sometimes a little more dragon than human, and greedy eyes staring at the shimmering gold of the dragons’ hoards.

Leonard stole her trinkets, would have stolen her the world if he could.

They spoke the dragons’ language as they got older, ancient phrases bleeding into their English until they weren’t sure they could communicate with the human world anymore. Not without risk. Not without giving it away.

Still, Leonard snuck away from the safety of their home to watch the humans. There was a family he liked to observe, two parents moving with a comfortable harmony his parents had never had. A gaggle of children running around the legs of their eldest brother. The eldest watched them with a fond exasperation as fingers played with fire-makers.

The fire-makers— _lighters_ , he reminded himself—made the boy’s parents look uneasy, but Leonard admired the awe the teen gave the flame. Dragon-kind as he was, he’d always leaned more towards the cooler temperatures and the cold chill of the river’s water. The boy felt like dragon-kind, but different. Something twisted in his chest while Leonard watched him, an anxious excitement sparking up every time the boy’s eyes seemed to drift over Leonard’s hiding place.

Agni—the only father Lisa had ever known and the only one Leonard ever truly loved—warned him away from the boy, but he went back anyway. He trusted the dragons, but he also had to trust himself and something about the boy with his broad shoulders and firm set of his jaw drew Leonard in. A dragon to a flame, he thought wryly.

 

 

Then, the boy followed him back.

 

 

He shouldn’t have been able to do it. Leonard was slippery and he knew the woods like they knew him. The nymphs in the trees didn’t _like him_ , but they respected dragon-kind and they should have warned him that the boy had caught on enough to follow him.

They didn’t and the boy slipped past the wards and into dragon territory with steps that shouldn’t have been so quiet when one looked at his heavy boots.

A hand fell on his shoulder and spun him around until Leonard’s back hit a tree. “The hell is this?” the boy asked, voice dripping in a Keystone accent that woke up the Central one Leonard had spent years trying to shake.

“Private,” he drawled and pretended that his heart wasn’t pounding in his chest. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“You’ve been stalking me for years,” the boy shot back.

Leonard went stiff as his eyes went wide. He knew. He _knew_. “How?” he asked instead of answering.

One shoulder lifted up in a shrug. “Felt you,” the boy replied, but even he sounded like he didn’t understand.

Leonard opened his mouth to say something, but was cut off by the Agni’s roar. No fire came—Leonard suspected the boy would have been distracted if it had—but they both went stiff. The boy’s arms dropped as Agni came barreling into the clearing with his wings spread wide and sparks crackling at his jaw.

“Step away from him, hunter,” Agni warned. He didn’t look deterred when the boy looked back at him, bewildered.

“That’s a…” The boy trailed off and Leonard opened his mouth to finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. The word _dragon_ got swallowed by the boy’s startled laugh. “The giant toads _talk_?!”

Agni faltered, insulted.

Leonard started laughing.

 

 

“I’m a _what_?” Mick—it was nice to finally put a name to the face—sputtered when Leonard’s laughter died down and Agni had identified him as a dragon hunter. Leonard stiffened at the term, protectiveness rising up in him, but Mick seemed too clueless to be a threat.

Hell, he’d called dragons giant _toads_. How dangerous could he be?

But Leonard had heard the stories of the dragon hunters, listened to the same stories a distrusting Agni was telling Mick. Generations of hunters, born with magic in their blood, that were drawn to dragons. Centuries ago, they’d hunted them to near-extinction. It was why dragons had found the need to tie themselves to humans, hoping to build a defense and offer a protection to the ones that cared for them.

It was as much give and take as anything Leonard had ever known, a natural balance that had felt right the second the clan welcomed him and Lisa into their home. It hadn’t mattered that Lisa wasn’t bound to them by blood the way Leonard was. Her name and her connection to Leonard had been enough as she was raised under the guidance of Leonard’s hands and dragons’ leathery wings.

Leonard and Lisa Snart had died a long time ago, their past lost and buried in the empty caskets Central City had buried. They had taken his mother’s name instead and felt an echo of her as she welcomed Lisa into her family.

But Mick was new. Mick was an unfamiliar, because for as much as Leonard had watched him over the years, he didn’t know him. His gut twisted at the sight of Mick caged in by Agni’s claws, but he didn’t try to get Mick free. Mick didn’t even try to free himself.

“You were ruining the crops,” Mick argued. “I wouldn’t have been going after anything if you weren’t messing with them.”

“Our humans need sustenance,” Agni replied without a single apologetic tone. The younger dragons—smaller and less obvious than Agni’s huge stature—had an easier time slipping through to gather food. It hadn’t solely fed Leonard and Lisa, but the bulk of it had gone to them as the dragons’ diets focused more on the magical food their pocket dimension offered.

But humans needed human food.

“How many of them are you?” Mick asked as wide eyes turned to Leonard.

“Two,” he answered before Agni could tell him not to. “You can let him go. He’s not a threat.”

“He’s a hunter.”

“He likes fire,” he countered, because they both knew hunters had a blood-born hatred of the flame. “I don’t think he’s like the others.”

“You’d risk Lisa on an anomaly?”

“I never said I was taking him to Lisa,” Leonard shot back. “But you took her in without the blood bond, because you trusted your gut. Trust mine.”

“You don’t trust the dragons?”

“You know I do,” he snapped. “I trust myself too.”

“Leonard-”

“ _Imenenyi_ ,” he told him in his mother’s tongue. “Trust me, Agni.”

Agni scowled back at him, barking words in the dragons’ language that Leonard shot back in. Back and forth, they argued as Mick watched them with wide eyes. Angry, reptilian eyes met resolute blue. Sharp tongues. Barbed words. Warnings.

“Look,” Mick cut in, squirming under the restraint of Agni’s claws, “my ma’s gonna be pissed if I’m late to dinner. Can we just shelve the whole thing for later?” He jerked his head towards Leonard. “He stalks me every day, anyway. Not like I’m gonna disappear.”

Leonard flushed. “It’s not every day,” he muttered under his breath, but it fell on deaf ears. “He has a family too,” he reminded Agni as Mick froze. “He won’t risk them.”

“You’re threatening them now?” Mick snapped.

“Warning,” Leonard corrected. “He doesn’t hurt my family, there’s no retribution against his. Deal?”

Mick glared back at him, fingers twitching so much his hands were almost going into spasms. He curled them into fists instead, arms shaking all the way to his shoulders. “You go near them, I’ll burn you alive.”

“Somehow, I don’t think fire would do much to them,” he said flippantly, but his eyes stayed serious as he looked back at Agni. “I’ll take him home.”

Agni growled his name, deep and low, without ever opening his mouth, but Leonard took the warning tone for what it was. The dragon didn’t like it, didn’t trust a hunter near his children or in his territory, but Leonard had always just been a hair too free for him. He fought just a little too hard against customs, fighting back like he’d never been able to fight against Lewis Snart.

Leonard Snart had been a child.

Leonard Hashim was dragon-kind and too stubborn for his own good.

 

 

He took Mick out of the pocket dimension and back to his farm without a word. They didn’t touch. They didn’t so much as look at each other, eyes set straight ahead. Mick stumbled over terrain Leonard practically floated over and Leonard spared a second to glare at the nymphs that hadn’t warned him about Mick in the first place.

Magic being or not, he would have appreciated a heads up.

He stopped at the edge of the property, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his coat as he stared at the house. “You’re late,” he told him and turned his eyes towards the setting sun. “Your mother will be looking for you.”

“What _are_ you?”

“Human.”

“The dragons-”

“-are family. You heard the stories,” he told him. “They won’t hurt yours if you don’t hurt theirs.”

“I don’t want anything to do with that crap,” Mick hissed at him. “I thought they were toads eating our damn corn.”

Despite himself, Leonard smiled and looked towards Mick. “The fledgings’ eyes are usually too big for their stomach.” Especially considering they didn’t even eat the corn, just overestimated how much a human stomach could handle.

“My siblings?”

“I told you,” he said again, “leave mine alone and yours will be fine.” He settled Mick with a serious look. “I don’t hurt kids.”

“You have a sister, right? That’s what the dragon was saying?” Mick checked, but he didn’t wait for an answer before he nodded to himself. “I won’t get in the way.”

“Neither will we,” he promised. “We’re not Fae, but we keep our word.”

“I don’t even want to know,” Mick muttered to himself and started the trek back towards the house.

“Mick?”

He paused and glanced back. “What?”

Leonard lifted the other boy’s lighter from his pocket, flaunting his prize. “I’m keeping this,” he told him as Mick sputtered. “It’s too dry out here. You play with this, a lot of people are going to get hurt.”

Mick stilled, his face a shade paler than it was before. “What? You’re a seer now too?”

“I grew up with dragons,” he told him flatly. “I know fire. But if you want this back…”

Mick reached out for the lighter at the same time Leonard offered it, but he hesitated and dropped his hand. “I want it back,” he said instead, “you got that?”

Leonard hummed softly and slipped the lighter back into his pocket. “After it rains,” he said, “I’ll bring it back.”

“Leave the dragons at home.”

Leonard smiled at him, more of a smirk than anything, and disappeared back into the trees.

 

 

He came back after a storm ripped through Keystone. The dragons stayed behind, warm and dry in the safety of their realm while Lisa and him moved back towards the human world. He’d meant to leave her at home, but she begged, pleading for human children to play with, and he relented.

She clung to his hand as they broke through the clearing and onto the Rory’s land. They hesitated at the border, fingers trailing over wards laid centuries before, and stepped over. The wards sparked, a warning if they meant to bring harm, but Lisa’s intentions were as pure as any five-year-old’s and he only meant to return the lighter.

Mick was waiting for him, sat up on the wheel of a tractor. He hopped down when he saw them, hand already held out. “Give it back.”

“It’s only been a week,” Leonard chided, teasing just a little bit as he handed it back. “One wrong move before and your whole house would have gone up.”

Something in Mick’s eyes sparked, an aching want to see a fire that big, but it got drowned out by a nausea, because his house burning meant his family burning. He swallowed it all back and looked at Lisa. “Why’d you bring her?”

Lisa looked up at him, one hand clutching Leonard’s while the other played with the gold chain around her neck. It matched the shining studs in her ears. “Can I play?” she asked, looking between him and Mick before her eyes drifted towards where the younger children were playing tag.

“She doesn’t know many humans,” Leonard admitted after Mick had waved her along and yelled to his siblings that she was a friend’s sister.

“Whatever,” Mick huffed and turned his focus to the lighter.

They sat there for hours, one staring at a flame while the other watched children play. Mick’s parents came out once, accepting stories about a kid Mick knew from a stint in juvie, though his mother eyed Leonard warily. She knew, he thought as she glanced down at his boots that were made of a leather a cow didn’t give.

“He’s not like the others,” she told him at one point after she’d sent Mick inside to get the kids washed up for dinner.

“I didn’t think he was,” he replied carefully.

“We just want to live here,” she continued. “The wars ended a long time ago. My children are no danger to yours.”

“Likewise,” he told her, promise heavy on his tongue.

She gave him a smile and told him to join them for dinner.

 

 

He went back.

They went back.

He brought Mick across the realms on occasion, working the other boy into the scenery until the fledgings included him in their games and the elders barely batted an eye. Agni accepted him with a grumbling reluctance and never included him as dragon-kind, but he did gift Mick with a spelled rock that would burst into controlled burns.

“It was meant to be a booby trap,” Agni admitted to Leonard once while they lounged on a big rock by the water. “It never worked quite right.”

“You gave him a broken fire starter?”

“The magic would only respond to humans,” he explained. “It was of no use to dragons in the war.”

“But Mick…”

“Is not like the others,” Agni admitted softly. “I found it fitting.”

Leonard hummed and wondered how the old dragon would react when he found out Leonard intended to take Mick as his mate.

(It ended up involving a lot of grumbling and a very confused Mick who hadn’t even known Leonard was interested in the first place.)

The End


End file.
